Manage the huMONGOus amount of data collected through your web application with MongoDB. This authoritative introduction—written by a core contributor to the project—shows you the many advantages of using document-oriented databases, and demonstrates how this reliable, high-performance system allows for almost infinite horizontal scalability.

This updated second edition provides guidance for database developers, advanced configuration for system administrators, and an overview of the concepts and use cases for other people on your project. Ideal for NoSQL newcomers and experienced MongoDB users alike, this guide provides numerous real-world schema design examples.

Get started with MongoDB core concepts and vocabulary

Perform basic write operations at different levels of safety and speed

Kristina Chodorow

Kristina is a software engineer who worked on the MongoDB core for five years. She led MongoDB's replica set development as well as writing the PHP and Perl drivers. She has given talks on MongoDB at meetups and conferences around the world and maintains a blog on technical topics at http://www.kchodorow.com. She currently works at Google.

The animal on the cover of MongoDB: The DefinitiveGuide is a mongoose lemur, a member of a highly diverse group ofprimates endemic to Madagascar. Ancestral lemurs are believed to haveinadvertently traveled to Madagascar from Africa (a trip of at least 350miles) by raft some 65 million years ago. Freed from competition with otherAfrican species (such as monkeys and squirrels), lemurs adapted to fill awide variety of ecological niches, branching into the almost 100 speciesknown today. These animals’ otherworldly calls, nocturnal activity, andglowing eyes earned them their name, which comes from thelemures (specters) of Roman myth. Malagasy culture alsoassociates lemurs with the supernatural, variously considering them thesouls of ancestors, the source of taboo, or spirits bent on revenge. Somevillages identify a particular species of lemur as the ancestor of theirgroup.

Mongoose lemurs (Eulemur mongoz) are medium-sizedlemurs, about 12 to 18 inches long and 3 to 4 pounds. The bushy tail adds anadditional 16 to 25 inches. Females and young lemurs have white beards,while males have red beards and cheeks. Mongoose lemurs eat fruit andflowers and they act as pollinators for some plants; they are particularlyfond of the nectar of the kapok tree. They may also eat leaves and insects.

Mongoose lemurs inhabit the dry forests of northwestern Madagascar.One of the two species of lemur found outside of Madagascar, they also livein the Comoros Islands (where they are believed to have been introduced byhumans). They have the unusual quality of being cathemeral (alternatelywakeful during the day and at night), changing their activity patterns tosuit the wet and dry seasons. Mongoose lemurs are threatened by habitat lossand they are classified as a vulnerable species.

The cover image is from Lydekker’s Royal NaturalHistory. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font isAdobe Minion Pro; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is Dalton Maag's Ubuntu Mono

Kristina explains complex topics clearly. The book is fun to read without being frivolous and provides a lot of information in about 400 pages. Each chapter dives into a topic but doesn't lose you in a morass of details. You get what you need, the examples are clear, and chapters are short enough to digest.

My only frustration is that the editing job was not rigorous. Phrase mismatches, scripts unnamed, and words broken between lines with no hyphenation.

If you're interested in MongoDB and are ready to go from "Zero to Hero", look no further. This book and some hands-on experience will make you a valuable player in the NoSQL realm.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review program. The opinion here is not influenced by that.It is only my own and honest opinion of this product.

MongoDB is one of the stars in the NoSQL market (surpassed in popularity maybe only by Cassandra) and several books are now available.One of the most popular ones has been MongoDB: The Definitive Guide of which a 2nd edition is now available .

The 2nd edition is about twice as big as the first edition and has over 400 pages.

The book covers everything from the basics to replication, sharding, server administration and schema design.I liked the examples chosen. They are not too complicated and as a reader I could concentrate on the MongoDB stuff and didn't have to invest a lot of time to understand the business logic of the examples (some books come up with way to complicated examples and then have a hard time explaining what's really important to the reader).

The text is easy to read and never gets boring. I like the fact that the PDF ebook has syntax highlighting in the code examples, that makes the examples easier to read.

I would have liked to see a short comparison with some other NoSQL databases like Riak or Cassandra but one can find this information online via a Google search easily.

The book is not intended as a guide to all the different drivers for different languages. But when you understand the content of the book, it shouldn't be too hard to use it from any programming language that has a decent driver for MongoDB like Scala, Java, Python or Ruby.

Summary:If you are a developer or system administrator working with MongoDB and want a comprehensive, easy to read book, I highly recommend "MongoDB: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition".

I'm looking into MongoDB for a cloud startup: it's my first serious use of a document-centric store. I guess I'm somewhere between ambitious novice and early intermediate on O'Reilly's scale. If you're in a similar place then this title deserves to be on your bookshelf. The first half is an thorough introduction to designing a MongoDB collection: easy to read with right-size examples. Indexing, aggregation and document embedding are clearly explained with tips about optimizations and design trade-offs. For deeper discussion of specific use cases Rick Copeland's "MongoDB Applied Design Patterns" might be a good companion text.

The second half is mainly about deployment decisions (replication, sharding, administration) and looks ideal, but I haven't dug so deeply into that yet.